September 23, 2010

It’s the National Sex Ed Week of Action! Now with PRIZES! (For the first reader who emails me with answers to the quiz below!) But first, a quick true or false:

• The United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate among the world’s developed nations.

• According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least one in four teen girls has a sexually transmitted infection.

• Half of sexually active young people in the U.S. will contract a sexually transmitted infection by age 25.

• Approximately 750,000 teenagers in the United States will become pregnant this year.

• The health care reform bill included a renewal of $50 million per year funding of abstinence-only education for states until 2014.

• This Op-Ed by an Atlanta teen about the importance of comprehensive, accurate sex ed is awesome.

Answer key: TRUE, TRUE, TRUE, TRUE, TRUE, TRUE.

Which, now that we’re all riled up, brings us to the one with PRIZES!Planned Parenthood of NYC, BG’s local affiliate, is giving away a package of safe-sex goodies to the BG reader who emails me with the correct answers to all five of the following (at least peripherally) sex-ed related questions. Pencils ready?

1. In how many states is it still illegal for an unmarried heterosexual couple to live together?

2. What was the name of the first daytime television show to feature a same sex wedding?

3. What famous female advocate founded the first birth control clinic and later founded Planned Parenthood?

4. Japanese love pillows, which usually decorated with life-size animae characters are called what?

5. What species was the famous gay couple who raised an offspring named Tango together?

June 4, 2008

Though I generally loathe “Ladies! It’s still possible to get married after [X advanced age]!” stories — maybe we don’t want to get married at any age? Maybe, like George Clooney, we want to stay single for life? And that’s so sad and weird because? — I did, in fact, read this entire USA Today article and will now force it upon you, too.

What I was intrigued to find out was not that it is (”Ladies!”) still possible to get married for the first time after age 45 and that growing numbers of people are doing just that, but rather this: that the CDCtracks this information. As in: “A tally by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is available just for a 20-year period, 1970 to 1990, shows that in 1990, only 0.4% of women and 0.6% of men married for the first time at ages 45 to 49.” Huh. I thought the CDC tracked (not to mention controlled and prevented), you know, diseases — where one might still find the plague, for example. I’m not sure what this means for marriage. Pox, anyone?